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Friday, August 7, 2015

My Love/Hate Relationship With Writing

I love writing. I wish I'd never started writing so I could spend more time reading. I like writing better than reading now! Writing is way more work than it should be. Writing is the BEST THING EVER!!!

Those are the cycles I'm always circling through. One day I'll sluggishly scrawl out 100 words, another day I'll write 1, 000+ in an evening and forget there ever was such a thing as "not enjoying to write".

And I'm only at 20, 324 words! I'm also scheming out a twist on Sleeping Beauty to enter into a writing contest, and a few paragraphs from a short story I'm hoping to enter into another contest.

Writing is hard work. If reading is like eating, writing is like cooking off your own recipe. It could take hours for only a few minutes of eating. In cooking, I spill ingredients and have to clean them up. I have to make changes I wasn't expecting and skip directions I'd fully intended to do.

So, anyways. I'm no expert at writing but I do love to talk about it-- so tell me: what do you think about writing? Have you ever tried writing novels or do you prefer short stories and poems?

Oh, and in case you'd like to see a bit of what I've been working on-- here's an excerpt.

Resting on a thin carpet,Keira wedged her fingernails underneath the dusty lid and yanked. Nothing. It felt like the box and lid were gummy. She curled her fingers around the edges and pried on the lid. Again, nothing. The girl rubbed her thumb against her fingers and set spinning whirls of thick, furry dust. Keira anchored her legs around the wooden cube, gripped the top, and yanked. Crack.

She tumbled backwards and massaged her hands satisfyingly. Keira dipped her arm in the wooden frame. A shriveling paper slipped inside her hand. Someone had scribbled a happy face in oil crayons on the yellowed sheet. The subject was a young girl. About 2 moons. A puff of straight, frizzy hair and green eyes sparkled through the sketch. The artist had written “Greta” in the bottom right corner.

Keira gently placed the portrait next to her folded feet and reached for another item. A leather-bound journal slid from the wooden frame. A fraying ribbon bookmark was pinched between the last void pages. Keira flipped to the first page and began to read its scrawled contents.

2 comments:

Nice! I've tried my hand at creative-story-writing before, but right now I'm not very "into" it…p'raps later:) I do enjoy writing poetry, though!

Oooh, are you going to enter into the Five Magic Spindles contest? It'd be so cool if you did! I'm toying with the idea…maybe, maybe not…I think it'd be fun, though:D

Wow! That snippet was great!!! I'd like to know more, hehe;) The only thing I'd say, I think (since, after all, you did ask for any critique), would be, maybe think about combining a couple of your sentences to make for longer ones? But that's just a personal preference--I have this thing for long, grammatically-run-on sentences XD